Thursday 27 December 2012

Wednesday December 26

I was in a rather grumpy mood this morning for reasons I will enlarge on later. I didn't get out until 11.00 am by which time heavy grey cloud had rolled in.

I walked from Church Farm again, and saw nine Siskins in the trees overlooking the corrugated barn.

Siskin
These were nice to see, and were to prove to be the highlight of the morning. The Flash contained a respectable 215 Lapwings, but only 17 Teal and two Grey Herons. While the walk back added 50 Chaffinches and not a lot else.

The reason for my grumpiness was that I had seen a site called patchworkchallenge.blogspot.com which invited participants to submit their yearlists into some sort of playing field leveller in order to produce a yearlist competition which all competitors would have a chance of winning. Well that sounded a fun idea so I tried to produce a map of my area to send them in order to prove my patch was less than 3 square kms (it's under 2 square kms) and to register my interest.

This should have been straightforward apparently, but after downloading (or possibly uploading) various relevant (or possibly irrelevant) applications or whatever they were, I got myself into a complete tangle. Hence the bad mood. The sad truth is that I only have a limited grasp of information technology and it doesn't take much to get me out of my comfort zone, so unless I get a flash of inspiration I won't be joining in.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Richard,
    This is what I did to make a map. I used http://www.freemaptools.com/area-calculator.htm to mark out the patch size/boundaries. Search for Morton Bagot, then select Satellite view in top right hand corner of the map. Click on the map where you want your boundary to be, then with the whole of your patch on-screen press the PrintScreen button on your keyboard. Open Microsoft Paint (or similar programme) and paste the screen-grap in there, and save. Let me know if I can help further. Good to see another Warks patch participating.
    Hope you had a good Christmas.
    Kind regards,
    Matt

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    1. Hi Matt

      Thanks very much for your help. I managed to do the mapping bit, but something went wrong when I tried to download Microsoft Paint. Apparently I have a bad gateway.
      I plan to see if my brother-in-law can spare the time to come over and take a look (he knows about computers). But failing that, I may need to take up your offer of further assistance.
      Thanks
      Rich

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